Clinton Arrival in Pakistan Met by Fatal Attacks

An explosion in Peshawar left as many as 101 dead and underscored the challenges facing U.S. policymakers as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came to Islamabad.

MARK LANDLER and ISMAIL KHAN

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan punctuated Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s arrival here with deadly attacks on Wednesday, underscoring their ability to cause chaos even in the face of offensives on both sides of the border.

In Pakistan, a devastating car bomb tore through a congested market in the northwest city of Peshawar, killing as many as 101 people, many of them women and children. Pakistani authorities said the attack was the country’s most serious in two years, and the deadliest ever in Peshawar, which has become a front line for Taliban efforts to destabilize the government through violence.

In the Afghan capital, Kabul, Taliban militants stormed a guesthouse, killing five United Nations employees and three other people in a furious two-hour siege. The attack was meant to scare Afghans away from voting in a runoff election on Nov. 7 between President Hamid Karzai and his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a Taliban spokesman said.

The violence cast a shadow over the visit of Mrs. Clinton, who was meeting with government ministers in Islamabad, 90 miles southwest of Peshawar, when news of the Peshawar explosion came over television screens. Mrs. Clinton immediately condemned the bombing, which in killing women and children in Peshawar seemed aimed at the very constituencies she has championed in her travels to other developing countries.

“These attacks on innocent people are cowardly; they are not courageous, they are cowardly,” Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference with the Pakistani foreign minister, her voice raw with anger.

“They know they are on the losing side of history,” she said of the militants. “But they are determined to take as many lives with them as their movement is finally exposed for the nihilistic, empty effort it is.”

In a vivid tableau, some television stations broadcast Mrs. Clinton’s remarks on a split screen — one half showing her speaking, the other half dominated by plumes of gray smoke and flames from the blast.

While there was no evidence that the attacks were coordinated, they may be traced to Taliban factions based in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Pakistani Army forces have taken on a widening campaign against the militants.

Responsibility for the Kabul attacks, which included rockets fired at the five-star Serena Hotel, was claimed by an Afghan Taliban faction led by Siraj Haqqani, who uses his base in North Waziristan, along the Afghan border, to organize an insurgency against American and NATO forces.

“This is a very dark day for the U.N. in Afghanistan,” said Kai Eide, the United Nations special representative to Afghanistan. He said officials of the organization would review “whether other appropriate measures need to be taken to protect all our staff.”

No one claimed responsibility for the Peshawar bombing, but the authorities said it appeared to be another in a series of attacks by Pakistani Taliban militants to answer the military’s offensive against their stronghold in South Waziristan.

Since the military moved into the region this month, the Pakistani Taliban have shifted their attacks from suicide bombings aimed at security installations and Western targets to more powerful and more indiscriminate bombings in urban centers intended to kill large numbers of Pakistani civilians.

“The militants want to destabilize the government and intimidate the public,” Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier and defense analyst based in Peshawar, told the Geo news network. As long as the military operation continues, he added, “We can expect such attacks to carry on.”

A senior intelligence official blamed Taliban militants based in Darra Adamkhel for the attack. “We had an intercept last week that spoke of a ‘heart-rending’ attack in Peshawar,” the official said, requesting he not be identified. The militants, he said, spoke of carrying out the attack to “unnerve” the government. “This explains why they are now targeting civilians,” he said.

At a dinner for Mrs. Clinton, President Asif Ali Zardari characterized the violence as an attack on Pakistan’s way of life and said there was no choice but to strike back.

Mrs. Clinton praised the Pakistani military for its campaign against insurgents in South Waziristan, saying: “I want you to know that this fight is not Pakistan’s alone. This is our struggle as well.”

She responded to criticism here that the United States had drawn down its forces in the Afghan border region, allowing more extremists to flow into Pakistan. The complaint reversed familiar American demands that Pakistan do more to stem the flow of insurgents into Afghanistan. The Pentagon, she insisted, has put more forces in that region, but has consolidated its border outposts into fewer, larger posts.

For all the talk of security, Mrs. Clinton stuck to her goal of trying to broaden the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. She announced a new American-financed energy program that would help Pakistan repair and upgrade its aging power plants to cut down on power failures. The United States will contribute $125 million to the first phase of the program.

Mrs. Clinton tied the program to a broader American effort to improve the lives of Pakistanis.

“For months, families have endured sweltering heat and evenings spent in the dark, without appliances or televisions or computers,” she said, adding that “blackouts prompt an increase in crime.”

That observation seemed almost quaint on a day when Pakistan was convulsed in a crime wave of a different magnitude.

The attack in Peshawar was not a total surprise, according to Pakistani and American officials. A representative of a shopkeepers association in Peshawar said that he and others had received demands from militants in recent days to ban women from shopping in the market.

The car bomb exploded between two narrow lanes of Meena Bazaar and Kochi Bazaar, an area frequented by female shoppers. Most of the bodies were charred and mutilated beyond recognition.

Hospital officials said 87 bodies had been brought from the scene, where as many as three clusters of shops on narrow lanes and passageways collapsed, and fires raged out of control. Three hours after the explosion, people were still trying to dig bodies and survivors out, witnesses said.

Sahibzada Anees, the deputy coordination officer in Peshawar, said the city was poorly equipped to cope with such a large-scale attack. It does not have enough trained firefighters and could not move excavators into the narrow streets to rescue those buried in the rubble, she said.

At the colonial-era Lady Reading Hospital, medics were overwhelmed by the casualties.

“We don’t even have time to count the bodies,” said an official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of government rules.

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